Joe's Campfire, Sidesaddles and Geysers: Women's Adventures in Early Yellowstone

The Cooke City Montana Museum will host Humanities Montana Speakers Bureau program “Sidesaddles and Geysers: Women’s Adventures in Early Yellowstone” with Mark Miller on July 12th. The program will be at the Cooke City Montana Museum at 7:30 pm. The presentation is free and open to the public. Partial funding for the Speakers Bureau program is provided by a legislative grant from Montana’s Cultural Trust and from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

In the 19th century hundreds of women risked being mauled by a bear, scalded in a geyser, or captured by an Indian to see the wonders of Yellowstone Park—and lived to tell their stories. Scholar Mark Miller presents the very best of these travelers’ tales selected from his collection of more than 200 first-person accounts of Yellowstone travel. He covers the period between 1872 when the park was first established through the Model T era in the 1920s, a period of dramatic. Miller will describe how developments such as roads, railroads, and hotels altered “The Yellowstone Experience,” and he places travelers’ experiences in context with biographical information, bringing women’s stories to life in their own words and illustrating them with historic photos in a PowerPoint presentation.

Articles by writer and speaker M. Mark Miller of Bozeman, Mont., appear in academic journals and magazines like Big Sky Journal and Pioneer Museum Quarterly. His interest in early travel to Yellowstone Park was sparked by stories his grandmother told about her horseback trip to Yellowstone in 1909.